40 engineers on Hacker News describe using AWS CloudFormation first-hand: 5 endorse it, 13 regret it, 3 are mixed.
“I would much rather run a 4 line CloudFormation template and do it in less than a second over it taking months to do it in house”
endorse · production · scarface_74 · 2024-12-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?“once we moved to CDK from lpt+cfn, which was way worse imo”
regret · production · hughesjj · 2024-09-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?“it became impossible to upgrade the CloudFormation template.”
regret · production · bvanderveen · 2023-04-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“CloudFormation is much, much slower and has failure modes where it can take hours before the CF service returns to a manageable state.”
regret · production · acdha · 2023-01-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Cloudformation was so hard to work with (at least our implementation) that replacing it with terraform was easy”
regret · production · dijit · 2022-04-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we switched to Terraform was because it let us take advantage of new AWS features on average much faster than CloudFormation.”
regret · production · acdha · 2021-10-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?“which has always been one of the core strengths of CF (and others) when done properly.”
endorse · production · fimbulvetr · 2021-06-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?“before terraform the alternatives were terrible. remember cloudformation? never again.”
regret · production · femiagbabiaka · 2021-06-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We actually orchestrated and wrapped cloudformation so that if smth couldn't be done in CFN, it would still be automated and reproducible.”
mixed · production · andreineculau · 2021-04-18 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I used to write raw Cloudformation at my last internship, and being able to write Typescript instead”
regret · production · arman_ashrafian · 2020-12-31 · source ↗ · wrong label?“CloudFormation rollbacks became a friend instead of an enemy.”
endorse · production · jeremya · 2020-11-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“it's a major reason why we switched to Terraform, along with not having to wait 6-12 months for support for new AWS features”
regret · production · acdha · 2020-04-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We've had 0 outages or sidetracks over the last year due to a SAM/CF bug, and we now have access to be features that came out in the last 18 months”
endorse · production · ldoughty · 2019-12-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“One issue I had with using CloudFormation was that when I built the Docker file with a tag of :latest... CloudFormation doesn't perform any updates”
regret · production · scarface74 · 2019-12-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“occasional CloudFormation funkiness (though no urgent prod issues yet, thankfully)”
regret · production · 1.5 yr · not_kurt_godel · 2018-06-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Cloudformation is not without its problems, even still.”
mixed · production · Rapzid · 2017-11-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Cloudformation can really be a harsh mistress... And nested stacks? You know, never say never.. Probably never again.”
regret · production · Rapzid · 2015-12-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Do not use it for your instances / databases etc, I can't recommend that enough, you'll get into a place where updating them is risky.”
mixed · production · cachemiss · 2015-12-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Lots and lots of CloudFormation. I can't stress how useful it is.”
endorse · production · mryan · 2013-01-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?“went from Cloudformation -> CDK -> Terraform -> Pulumi”
neutral · production · here2learnstuff · 2025-12-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?“they don't even trust (and some don't know how to run) my Terraform or CloudFormation scripts”
neutral · production · whstl · 2023-10-01 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we had some initial effort to automate and standardize CloudFormation configuration”
neutral · production · pwinnski · 2022-09-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?“when we use Troposphere to generate AWS cloudformation templates we always setup some specific values”
neutral · production · stevekemp · 2021-12-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We run similarly on CloudFormation.”
neutral · production · blntechie · 2020-12-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Both cloudformation stacks were identical (instance names, etc).”
neutral · production · txutxu · 2020-10-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Deploy all infrastructure from code via cloudformation or terraform.”
neutral · production · ben509 · 2020-08-18 · source ↗ · wrong label?“migrating a considerable amount of infrastructure code that used Troposphere (Python -> CloudFormation) into Terraform 0.12.”
neutral · production · mtalantikite · 2020-04-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“deployment to AWS Lambdas via CloudFormation commands (also invoked by Make) really simple.”
neutral · production · finaliteration · 2019-12-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Define cloud formation templates & scripts to boot the whole stack.”
neutral · production · shoo · 2019-06-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?“the method I use for doing this using a CloudFormation template”
neutral · production · jonthepirate · 2017-12-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?“a large Cloudformation file basically”
neutral · production · laurentl · 2017-12-21 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I do use curl commands in production for stuff like user data in an aws cloudformation template.”
neutral · production · empath75 · 2017-12-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we ended up writing lots of CloudFormation resources in serverless.yml”
neutral · production · Dunedan · 2017-03-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Just this week I introduced a guy on a totally different team to cloudformation”
neutral · production · empath75 · 2016-08-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?“when I spin up a new cluster via Cloudformation it's up and waiting for me as soon as I log in.”
neutral · production · namecast · 2015-09-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We use terraform to deploy to multiple clouds so you don't get locked in to something like cloudformation.”
neutral · production · steveb · 2015-06-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“At the moment we run a Flash server stack using Amazon CloudFormation”
neutral · production · fat0wl · 2013-11-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Using puppet and cloudformation or whatever it is that you prefer you can upgrade with very little trouble.”
neutral · production · dialtone · 2011-05-17 · source ↗ · wrong label?